Like the way your heart is sand in your palms with its grains falling to the ground from the overflow. Watch how each individual piece finds the gaps in the indents of your fingers, and they slowly escape from the comfort of your hands. Remember the way you begin to panic as you fear you’ll never see those little grains again. You begin to believe your heart may never be the same.

When someone breaks your heart, remember how you took it.

Like walking through the desert, you feel an exhaustion creep over you, but it doesn’t resemble tiredness. It resembles a battle between anger and sadness that has made your body a wasteland. As you look and see more empty, barren land, you wonder how you got there; you wonder how you’re going to get out of this hell alive. Looking out to the horizon, there is nothing more you can do than feel alone and scared. That’s when you pick a path: You either lay down in the dunes and let the sand swallow you, or you keep going. You get out.

When someone breaks your heart, remember they didn’t break you.

I can give no better advice then to remember the pain, and then learn from it. Remember your worth, remember your joy. Remember who you were without them, but most importantly remember what they taught you. Don’t be afraid to watch shows they introduced you to and R&B artist they listened to. Remember their work ethic and how that drove you to do better-be better. Be better, but be better without them.

Remember, even if your heart is made of sand, water makes sand mold together and mend. So cry. Cry into the same hands that hold your heart and let the pain you built up flow like it found a crack in the dam. Let that crack become an overflowing river and bring flowers to the desert. Curse and spit and speak on how you feel. That water, that release, is your first step to recovery.

And please, when someone breaks your heart, remember that sometimes they break their own heart in the process. Don’t hate them, heal from them. We love to learn a new perspective we can’t see on our own. We go through heartache to learn a little more of ourselves; a little more about or strength and our ability to adapt. Life is all about learning, and we never learn if we never hurt; we will never understand a lesson if we don’t take the time to reflect on it.

So think about it, cry about it, heal from it. Remember, every desert has a way out. You just have to keep going.